WASHINGTON — It’s a colonial era city in the midst of farm country. Famous for its peppermint candy and barbell factory, York also gained notoriety during the Revolutionary War when the Continental Congress stopped here long enough to draft the Articles of Confederation.

The city is a faded monument to a certain kind of American life: 18th century English and German settlements, Pennsylvania long rifles, a wariness of outsiders, social change, and Big City.

This made York the perfect place for John McCain and his team to lay out their core strategy in the race against Barack Obama.

Their messages:

This cold-blooded, chest-beating theme will either give McCain a real chance to overcome long odds and win the White House — or it will consign him to the dust bin of history.

For years, if not decades, McCain has positioned himself as the "thinking man’s" fighting man.

In York, Lieberman made things “perfectly clear,” to use an old Nixon term.

Introducing McCain at a large fairgrounds rally, Lieberman said the choice was “between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not.”

If the McCain campaign thought Lieberman had gone a step too far, they didn’t say so. Just the opposite: they posted his entire introduction online.

I asked McCain’s closest advisor and friend, Mark Salter, for an example of a time when Obama did not “put the country first.”

His answer: the Senate maneuvering of immigration legislation.

In his view, Obama did big labor’s bidding by helping to kill the chances for a grand compromise on immigration reform.

“His campaign came before his country,” Salter told me in an e-mail.

In other words, if you weren’t for McCain’s deal, you didn’t put the country first.

PAUL J. RICHARDS
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AFP/Getty Images

Sen. Joe Lieberman in York, Pa.

In York, McCain didn’t just wrap himself in the American flag — he wore it like a tight-fitting Olympic swimsuit.

And the folks in the stands loved every minute of it.

He also portrayed himself as the man who understands who our enemies are in the world — including a renascent Russian bear.

Obama, his aides said, was slow off the mark in his initial statements about the situation in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

The cheering crowd not only loved McCain’s combativeness, but seemed almost glad to be facing a familiar old foe: the Russians.

All in all, it was a good event for McCain.

The crowd comprised a slice of America that McCain needs if he intends to win Pennsylvania and the election.

And that slice is: white (I did not spot a single African American in the crowd), rural, “exurban,” and mostly Protestant, with local roots stretching back centuries.

They live in “The T” of Pennsylvania – which encompasses pretty much everything outside of the metropolitan areas of Philly and Pittsburgh.

It’s indubitably American.

But so, Obama will have to argue, is he.

He’s the up-by-the-bootstraps son of a wayward but brilliant immigrant father and an idealistic mom. He’s the kid who worked hard and took out loans to get an education at Columbia and Harvard. And he’s the candidate who loves his country for the chances it’s given him.